In last week’s column, I wrote: “As a reporter, I think it’s my job to try to make sense of it all…”

My sister-in-law, Betsy, who’s a poet and an artist and smarter than me, replied: “I have a slight difference of opinion with you this week. I think a reporter's job is to tell the facts and leave it to analysts and philosophers to make sense of it all.”

I felt like she had a point, but…

I admit I started out thinking that way. The first thing drummed into my head a rookie reporter back in 1970 was to stay out of the story. If I had an opinion about something, like Vietnam, it belonged on the Opinion Page, next to editorials and letters to the editor. News Page news was just the facts ma’am, like Joe Friday on Dragnet. Objective reality. What everybody would see even if they were looking at it from different angles.

I thought that way for most of the decade, until 1979. That’s when I first met Lyndon Larouche in an old hotel room on the sixth floor of an old hotel in downtown Detroit — Detroit, heart of America’s Industrial Heartland, showing signs of rust. At the time, I was a reporter at a Detroit metro newspaper.

How the meeting with Larouche came about is a story for another day. I’ll just say this: The New York Times had recently labeled him a Fascist and a Trotskyite, on the front page, where just the facts ma’am belong. (Classified documents released years later revealed that one of the Time’s “informed sources” was Henry Kissinger.)

The entrance to Larouche’s hotel room was guarded by a private security detail — two guys with guns who’d been trained at Mitch Werbell’s paramilitary training camp in the swamps of Louisiana, where Latin American revolutionaries went to train.

The guards said Larouche was expecting me and smiled as they let me in. They both seemed to be about my age, my generation, but on a different path, perhaps parallel, I just didn’t know.

Larouche was sitting at a table in front of a typewriter eating out of a sack of McDonald’s hamburgers. He offered me one but I’d just had a famous Lafayette Coney Island down the street.

I thought I was there to talk about fusion. I’d just recently learned about fusion while working on a series of stories about fission, which was big news in 1979.

On March 16, 1979, the day I turned 31 years old, a new blockbuster movie came out starring Jane Fonda, The China Syndrome, about a nuclear fission power plant on the verge of melting down, burning its way through the planet all the way to China, poisoning all of life. Twelve days later, on March 28, 1979, Three Mile Island happened.

So, yes, fission was big news at the time. The assignment editor pulled me off the Hoffa case and told me to look into the condition of Michigan’s nuclear reactors. There was a big one just south of the city.

It was while looking into fission that I first heard about fusion, which seemed like the perfect solution — a nuclear power plant that couldn’t melt down to China.

That summer, Princeton scientists had announced significant breakthroughs at their experimental fusion reactor. It created a splash of national news and caught my attention.

I called a Michigan Congressman I knew who was on the House Science and Technology Committee. He put me in touch with this person who put me in touch with that person until I finally wound up talking with a secretary in the Department of Energy who had a southern accent. I mentioned it and asked her where she was from. She said I had an accent, too, and asked me where I was from.

Apparently, she had nothing better to do than listen to my story. Finally, she said I should talk to Dr. Stephen Dean; that he was high up in the department’s fusion program and that he was a “good guy.”

She connected us.

I’ll never forget that first telephone conversation with Dr. Stephen Dean. We were about the same age, same generation, just different paths. In college I studied writers, he studied physics. His enthusiasm and passion caught me almost off guard, not what I was used to hearing from government bureaucrats. He thought fusion was the greatest thing in the world; tiny suns on earth that could never melt down. As a physicist he knew it could be done; it was complicated and hard to explain in the vernacular, but there was no known scientific reason why it couldn’t be done… except that it was also political.

That’s when he told me about an organization called The Fusion Energy Foundation. In a suddenly guarded voice, he told me to not mention how I had heard about it. I agreed.

He gave me a telephone number and we said goodbye. This column is the first time I’ve ever revealed him as a source. I recently called him about it. He said he was retiring and that it would be ok.

Next, I made contact with the Fusion Energy Foundation and learned that it was headed by a guy named Lyndon Larouche. They said Larouche would soon be traveling through Detroit and arrangements were made to meet with him.

When he stood up from his chair to shake my hand, he reminded me of a Prussian military officer I’d seen in a foreign film in college. He spoke in complete, punctuated sentences. I thought we were going to talk about fusion, but instead he started right off talking about the Press and Plato’s Allegory of the Cave.

“So,” he said, “you are a young newspaper reporter. That is a very important position.”

“I know,” I said in all seriousness. “Except for priests and elected officials, it’s the only job mentioned in the Constitution.”

“Are you familiar with Plato’s Allegory of the Cave?”

“Maybe.”

“People are gathered in a cave. A fire behind them castes their shadows on the facing wall. They think the shadows on the wall are real, another reality separate from them. Like the audience in a movie theatre imagines characters portrayed on the screen are real. Like readers of what you write in your newspaper. Perhaps you’ve heard, but the New York Times has painted me in lurid colors; a dangerous crackpot; a threat to established order. We’ve received death threats and warnings, thus the guards. What’s needed is to lift the screen so people can see for themselves who’s putting on the show.”

And that was it, in 1979, when I began looking at myself as a newspaper reporter in a different light. I couldn’t stay out of the story. I was the creator of the story on the screen and the people had a right to know that I, me, too was a fact; that it’s a fact that I want to make sense of it all, just like any analyst or philosopher.

But was this a reasonable response to the “difference of opinion” I was having with my sister-in-law?

I sent an email to Richard Connor. He should know. We’d started out together. He was the assignment editor who’d put me on the fission story. He wound up as the publisher of the Fort Worth Star Telegram and is still in the business, keeping his fingers in the stream, running a string of small town newspapers in New Mexico and Texas. He’s kind of a legend.

In my email to him, I explained the situation with Betsy and he responded in kind:

“One size does not fit all. Betsy has a point. You have one also. A good reporter can add nuance and color to a story — even a news story. They can be ‘interpretive.’ The good ones can. Editors need to know the difference. Editors are the foundation of a good newspaper.”

Then, probably after thinking about it some more, he added in a second email: “It is the form of journalism Hunter S. Thompson turned into fine art but he ultimately became so famous for it he made a mockery of a style invented by him and Tom Wolfe.”

And then I got another email from my sister-in-law: “I've thought for a while that you have the heart of a poet rather than a reporter. You got booted out of reporting but I think truck driving fed your spirit — seeing the country and adventuring —so now, the question is what do YOU really want to do and write? Love, Betsy.”

I think that settled the issue.

Love you, too, Betsy.